To fully appreciate this strophe
or verse, one must understand that Les Châtiments is
not simply a collection of poems; it is a unified work divided
into books and poems, just as a large novel is sometimes divided
into books and chapters. The poem, Nox (Latin for night), is for
all intents and purposes a prologue, standing before the numbered
books to announce the subject: darkness. (There is also an
epilogue, Lux, which follows the numbered books.) Nox refers both
to the night which now envelops France, the light of Liberty
having been stifled, and to the specific night when under cover
of darkness a President made of himself an Emperor.

The verse presented is mockingly
addressed to Napoleon III, as though given on the eve of December
2, 1851. This was Napoleon III's chosen date : as the anniversary
of his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte's triumph at Austerlitz, it
seemed a perfect moment to evoke the glory of the old Empire in
order to pave the way for a Second Empire. At the same time, the
decision furnishes an outraged Victor Hugo with a confirmation of
the hypocrisy of the act. The appellations given Napoleon -
assasin, robber-baron, bandit - underline that in this
"prince," Hugo sees a pretender to the throne.

Napoleon III would be resoundingly
confirmed as Emperor in around a year, but his actions on the eve
of December 2, 1851 are more indicative of a Richelieu than of a
popular figure for whose leadership the public was crying out.
That night, opposition leaders were rounded up and jailed. Later,
Napoleon's minions made a second round so that when Paris awoke
the next morning there were placards everywhere proclaiming the
Second Empire. The Second Empire, as grand as the name sounds,
did not come bursting into existence; it crept into the political
landscape of Paris on little cat feet.

While Les Contemplations are
often seen as the most personal of Hugo's verse, the tone of Les
Châtiments shows that Napoleon III had hit a very sensitive
nerve where Hugo was concerned. Hugo's rage was not solely rooted
in political convictions. Toward the end of the strophe, Hugo
evokes a Paris sleeping soundly in the knowledge that
Louis-Napoleon would never aspire to more than the Presidency.
Paris, however, was accepting enough of the idea of a Second
Empire to join with the rest of France in voting for it. Hugo's
friends, many of them jailed that evening, were the ones tossing
and turning. Indeed, they had been tossing and turning since
years before when Hugo convinced them that it was right and just
to release Louis-Napoleon from jail for stirring unrest. They
were concerned enough to make the future Emperor take a special
oath not to challenge the Republic before he was officially
installed as President. And they were upset, not surprised, when
he broke that oath.

That Hugo would become the symbol of the
exiled Republican in the era of Napoleon III carries a certain
irony. In his journal, Choses vues, Hugo had been
celebrating the ideal of a Republic since the 1830s, but always
with the hedge that the people weren't yet ready. At the same
time, he had been daydreaming about another Napoleon to unify the
mighty France under a single will. One would like to dismiss
these thoughts as the musings of a young man, but only three
years prior Hugo had taken to the public square to declare that a
regency, not an outright republic, was the best replacement for
an ousted Louis-Philippe. And one could plausibly argue that in
offering assurances about the charismatic Louis-Napoleon, Hugo
was at some level seeking to allow a quasi-restoration of the
Empire, only within the framework of a republic (and why not?
he'd been lobbying for a republic within the framework of a
monarchy for years before). The torrent of anger here unleashed
certainly owes in some measure to political principle, but it
also reveals the degree to which Hugo was wounded by the failure
of Louis-Napoleon and France alike to conform to his scenarios
for the republicanization of a France on the march to greatness.